Chills Ran Down My Spine

I closed my eyes for a moment and reopened them slowly, staring out over the balcony at the performance going on in front of me. As I watched, my body slowly rocking along to the beat, the lead singer looked up and our eyes made contact for a moment. It was less than a second, but in that second I felt like she could see through me, that she knew everything about me. But, as soon as her eyes moved away, the feeling vanished. 

The main women stands center and belts her voice. 

Last night, I saw an East African music concert based on the traditional concept of Zār. Going to see this performance, I wasn't exactly sure what to expect, as we had been given very little information about the performance until we actually got there. 

The set up for the performance space was rather interesting. There were chairs set-up up to a point and then there were cushions on the floor for people to sit on. And then there was the balcony,where chairs were set-up to overlook the performance space. I sat in a chair on the ground floor for the first half of the performance and then moved to the balcony for the second half due to the annoying woman sitting next to me.

 One of the band members sitting center plays the 6-string lyre known in Zar.

The performance itself was spectacular. Watching the group, Mazaher, perform brought to mind the image of the South in the States from a while back. The tribal like chanting and drum beating remind me of the images I've seen of VooDoo. And well, that makes complete sense as Zār is a healing ritual which is often mistaken for an exorcism ritual. The women also play a huge role in Zār, which is very rare to see here in Egyptian culture...at least in public its rare to see. Most women here are seen to be quiet and submissive to their male counterparts, even if they may be the dominant figure when in the house, they still maintain a different appearance outside of the house. But, here they certainly do not. 


The main woman belted her voice and it echoed throughout the entire theater. At some point it gave me chills and I understood why this was a healing ritual. It was beautiful. I'm so glad I went. 


It's Thursday here already. 7:16pm to be exact, and nearly one week ago exactly I left for an adventure to the Black and White Desert. And while I'm excited to tell about that adventure, I want to give everyone the full experience. So, sadly, you will all have to wait until I get a firewire over the weekend. But, this week was not devoid of fun, as seen by the concert above. 

Sunday was Haley's birthday and after I got home from class, we went out for sushi. Sushi here is still a new concept for many Egyptians, as seen by the fact that the restaurant was almost entirely empty. I got the all you can eat sushi deal, which was a pretty good idea as I'm pretty sure I saved myself some money and everyone helped out in eating what I couldn't. 


After sushi, we rented a felucca and took a cruise down the Nile until midnight. We danced, sang, talked and the captain even let Tyler and Haley drive the felucca. It was a great time and I think she had a wonderful birthday.

Garrett and Ann dance around on the felucca. 

 Tyler, Rebecca and Ann talk about something or other while on the felucca.

On Tuesday we had our AMIDEAST movie night, where we watched an American movie to show the Egyptians something about American culture. The movie was Freedom Writers, and the basic story was that of a high school in California suffering the effects of a new integration law and trouble between gangs, and a teacher who wants to fix it all. In my opinion, it was a good movie overall, but it definitely went to reinforce the stereotypes that were already in place in their minds about the American culture. We spent a lot of the time after the movie ensuring them that the United States was not like this everywhere, even though the movie was based on a true story. 


I also taught my class yesterday for the Access Program. The topic...sports. Which I know next to nothing about. So, thanks to the wonders of the internet,I was able to find the rules to American football and baseball and explain them to the best of my ability. While I do like teaching these kids, it drives me a little nuts that none of them want to speak. My job is to get them to use their English skills and learn the culture. But, none of them want to speak. I don't understand. I guess it has to do with the different learning style where the teacher just teaches and students just listen. Which is not really how I was taught growing up at all. I guess I just need to figure out a better way to make them talk. 

Oh yeah, one more thing. Tuesday, Will and I made a quick trip to the Egyptian Museum to pick out our objects for project we have to do. But, the two of us are extremely impressed with ourselves as we can actually really read the hieroglyphs on the coffins and statues. I'm learning so much in that class. I love it!


Well, that's all for now. My adventure on the Black and White Desert will be coming shortly. I promise. Probably sometime this weekend as there isn't anything planned at the moment, which is quite odd. Well, I'm sure I'll figure out something to do.

فين الأتوبيس؟

[Translation: Where's the bus?]

At the moment I am sitting here in my nice cool apartment, sipping on my mango colada juice, and realizing that I am completely exhausted from today and everything else this week. I'm also realizing just how many times I've tried to write this post and have failed. Oh well. 

I know I explained a little on Monday about the week, so I'll just do a quick recap and then I'll move onto the more recent stuff. But, it's been an exhausting week. 

Alrighty, so let's take this post back a little bit. Let's go back to the "Egyptian Wedding", which I found out wasn't actually a wedding, but the party for the groom's side of the family. It was still a lot of fun and I enjoyed it a lot. 

The following Thursday night consisted of me staying in and sleeping, something my body was telling me that I desperately needed...especially as I was falling asleep on the couch. 

Friday morning I woke up and received a phone call from a friend of my professor's, who she had been trying to put me in touch with for a while. We set up a time to meet and soon I was on my way to Shubra with the other kids in my program who didn't go to Alexandria for the weekend. We were going to visit some of the churches there as well as some other fun things, like the summer palace of Mohamed Ali Pasha. Well, when we got out to Shubra, we did visit the summer palace, but the churches were a no-go. Instead, we took a ferry across the river to a small island to look for a coffee shop. 


On the island, we found a lot of goats, a lack of cars, some odd looks from the locals and a rather sketchy looking "coffee shop". Needless to say, we ventured about halfway onto the island before promptly turning around and catching the next ferry back to the main land. I guess if nothing else, it was adventurous of us to even wander onto the island. 


Once safely back on land, we caught a taxi and headed into Zamalek for lunch before heading back home. Later in the evening, we (Lindley, Shruti, Will, Sean, Claudine and a few Egyptian friends) met up and then a went to rooftop party with Tamer, which was at an artsy type gallery. It was quite fun and I enjoyed it a lot.

Saturday rolled around a lot faster than I expected and I met with my professor's friend, Nigel, downtown. He was extremely nice and after hearing what his business did, I was super excited to hopefully have an internship with him. (Let's face it, I was super excited before I met him. The idea of working in docs [documentaries] or anything film/tv related even in the least makes me excited.) The "interview", I guess it could be called that, went really well and I was offered an internship that began the next morning. 


I returned to my apartment to work on my Customs and Habits paper and then hang out with Emy. We were supposed to go and see Avatar, but sadly the theater was sold out so instead we wandered around Khan Al-Khalili for a while. She taught me some new Arabic phrases, but I found it extremely difficult to learn them. Especially, when walking down the crowded streets of Cairo. I still feel very inadequate when it comes to trying to speaking the language. But, this too shall pass. 


I had to cut our time together short so that I could finish my Customs and Habits paper, and get to bed at a reasonable hour so I could be up for my internship in the morning. 


Alrighty, now for a quick interlude about my internship. I'm extremely excited. I'm working in Public Relations, which is something that has a major appeal to me because it deals with social media and promoting stuff. I'm super excited about having the hands on experience that this internship is allowing me to have and I've only been there a week. I also really enjoy my time in the office, which is always a good thing. Ok...interlude over. 


So, Sunday consisted of internship in the morning, Customs and Habits in the afternoon, then the dance performance, which I already covered in my last post, and of course the Oscars. As I have already discussed these items, I will omit them from this post and move on.


After IR, everyone thought it would be a great idea to gather for a "family dinner" night, which was awesome...at the time anyway. We had burrito night with homemade guacamole and it was just absolutely delicious. I crashed so hard after coming home from this, but the next morning was crappy. I don't know what it was, but something decided that it was not going to agree with me and I was majorly sick. 


I got up not feeling well, went to work feeling better and had a day of ups and downs. I pretty much decided after work that I was headed home to bed and not going to class. I let the proper channels know and headed home and crashed for a good eight hours. Sadly, I missed movie night at AMIDEAST, but I don't think I could have made it through. 


Wednesday was a much better day. I was able to sit through class and not be sick. After classes we had a lecture on Islamic Feminism by Dr. Riham Bahi who is going to be the new academic coordinator at AMIDEAST. It was a really good lecture and I enjoyed hearing about the issue, even though I'm unsure how I feel on the matter. Afterward, Matthew invited us to his apartment to have pizza and watch a documentary called Why Democracy?, and I highly recommend watching it. It takes on one of the issues that I actually advocate for...freedom of speech. And this looks at freedom of speech in Egypt. I don't want to talk about it too much as I don't want to give away what the doc is about. All I'm going to say is google it, I'm sure you'll find it and definitely watch it. 


Thursday came around rather fast this week and I found myself on another tour of Islamic Cairo, this time specifically Khan Al-Khalili. This day proved to be more eventful than ever intended. We visited on of the most famous mosques in the area, the Al-Hakim Mosque, and were even allowed to climb up and walk on the walls, which normally you aren't allowed to do. I got some pretty awesome pictures, but unfortunately, you will all have to wait to see them as they were taken on Sylvia and I left the firewire cable home. Oops. It reminded me a lot of the castles that I saw in Europe. The design was similar and another interesting aspect was the fact that some Pharaonic stones were used in the construction of the mosque. So, you could find stones with hieroglyphs in them randomly on the walls. We visited another mosque, which had a school attached to it, and it reminded me a lot of one we had seen in our previous tour. I think this one was the Aqmar Mosque, but I don't quite remember. 


Anyway, here the part of the story where things get rather odd. After the tour was ending, we started to head back to the bus. Sort of. Something had happened, and I was left out of the loop. It wasn't a problem that I was left out of the loop, but it was a problem that no one had bothered to tell our Arabic teachers, the two who were left to take us back to the bus, where the bus could be found. "فين الأتوبيس؟ ", "Feen el-autobees?" (translation: Where's the bus?) became one of the most common phrases we uttered to one another while trying to figure out what was going on and trying to find the bus. The one good thing that came out of this had to be the sugar cane juice that I got while we tried to figure everything out.


Even now, I'm still unsure of what actually happened, but according to everyone I've talked to everything got sorted out. We did find the bus and headed back home. 


Later that evening a very large group of us headed out to Muqattam Hill to hang out. There were a few wedding parties on the Hill and the city was all lit up. It looked beautiful. I stayed until about 1:30am when my stomach started to act up and I decided that going home was a good thing. 

I promise, I'm almost done summing up everything and then you can all go back to your regularly scheduled lives. On Friday morning, Sean and I myself made the trip out to Heliopolis to go on a tour with Tamer. There were supposed to be others, but we were the only two who came. The morning started with getting some of the best ice cream I ever had! I got creme brulee and Swiss vanilla cake roll ice cream covered in caramel sauce in a waffle cone. Oh man, it was amazing! 

We saw a Coptic Christian church and sat through about fifteen minutes of the church service before deciding that we should move on. We tried to visit another church, but found that it was only a night church and so we had to forgo the visit until a further trip. After this we made a stop at Cilantro, one of the local coffee shops around here, and we had juice and smoothies. Oh how I love the mango juice in this country!


Once we finished relaxing a bit, we traveled to Baron Palace which was a palace built by the guy who originally built Heliopolis for him to live in. It looks kind of out of place within the rest of Heliopolis, but is very pretty to look at as it consists of European style architecture with Indian decoration. I would have loved to have gone inside, but sadly the guards would not let us. They said it was subject to renovation at the moment. 


With this as pretty much the last stop on the tour, we hopped in a taxi and Tamer, Sean and I headed over to City Stars, the giant mall in Heliopolis. Sean was looking for some pants, which sadly we could not find any that he liked. While, I did find the set of earrings that I was looking for as well as a new camera, which I have so lovingly named Benjamin VII. It's nothing against Sylvia, but it is rather hard to take still photos with her and with Camille waiting on repair, Benjamin VII was rather necessary. So, soon I will be able to post more pictures! Yay! 


We had a lovely time shopping around the mall, and then we returned home before once again heading out. Some friends of Tamer's were having a party on the house boat that they lived on and he invited us along. It was a good time. I dance and met a lot of new interesting people. 


And that pretty much brings us to today. Saturday. The last day of my weekend here in Cairo. And I definitely made the most of it as a weekend, seeing as how I slept until noon today. When I finally did wake up, I got myself ready for another day of Egyptian cooking lessons. Now, don't get me wrong, I love the food we make, but it's always so chaotic to make. I don't even remember what we actually made today, but I do know that it was delicious and as soon as I get Benjamin connected to the computer, I will post those pictures. Overall, today was a good day. 


...Wow. That's it. As of this moment, everything in my life is pretty much caught up. I apologize for the length of this post and the lack of pictures, but things have been out of sorts this week as you can tell. I'm going to try and update more frequently...but, I'm pretty sure I've said this before and I have yet to follow up on that. Well, I'm going to try and do it this time. 


Also, this week coming up should be rather interesting. I don't have a whole lot of stuff going on, but I am heading to Faiyum this weekend as an excursion with my program and for the cultural festival. It should be loads of fun. Stay tuned, who knows what adventures this week will hold. After all, this is Egypt!

Over the River and Through the Desert, to Siwa Oasis We Go!

In 8 hours almost exactly from this moment in time, I will be on a bus heading to Siwa. I'm both excited and terrified, as this trip is full of both historical sites and desert excursions and 10 hour bus rides. I think that's what I'm dreading the most...the 10 hours I get to spend on the bus with the other students on my program. This could either be a good thing or a bad thing...we shall see tomorrow. 

In the meantime though, I'm almost packed and ready to tackle the weekend ahead. The itinerary looks amazing and I definitely think the thing I'm looking forward to the most is "sandboarding" during our day of desert excursions. 

I will update more about the happenings of this weekend when I return as I'm still unsure at this point if I want to bring my laptop with me. And then even if I do bring the laptop, whether or not I will have internet is still in question. So, you know. Just one of those things. 

In other news, this week has been pretty relaxed I've been hanging out with more of the kids in my program and some of the Egyptians that I've met. They seem to like me a lot. The concept of friendship here is also a much different one than friendship in America, but I'll elaborate at some other point. I've also went to classes and I decided what I'm going to write my first "Customs and Habits" (this is the name of a class I'm taking, just as a reference) paper on. I find it to be a pretty stereotypical "becky"-esque paper topic. I'm going to compare the burial rites and rituals of the Ancient Egyptian society to that of the current modern day American culture. If nothing else, I get to write about cemeteries and funerals. Cool, right?

This week wasn't as exhausting as past weeks, which was surprising as I definitely did more. Sunday consisted of class and then hanging out, and Monday was 12 hours of class with a few breaks sprinkled here and there. Tuesday was cleaning around the apartment, followed by watching Sweeney Todd with Mustafa and Mahmoud, followed by class, then a scheduled AMIDEAST movie night and then some Death Note with Salah and Mustafa and chili with everyone else. Tonight was pretty relaxing to as I had class and then a guest lecture on human rights and then packing. 

The movie night we had on Monday was rather interesting. It was called Desert in the Coffeehouse and pretty much the filmmaker just went around to coffeehouses in Minnesota and asked what people thought about the Middle East. You got a variety of ranges which just goes to show how much and how little the American people know about the Middle East. The discussion we had after the movie with the Egyptians was pretty interesting, but I don't think that I want to really talk politics with any of them...it just makes me angry. That's probably why I decided on International Communication as my specialization in IR and not anything else. Media I can do, other stuff makes me mad or apathetic. 

The lecture we had today was also pretty interesting, but I do wish the gentleman would have explained more on the human rights breaches here in Egypt, instead of focusing on the upcoming election and controversy surrounding that. 

Ok, I feel like I'm rambling now. I think that means time to make sure everything is fully packed, and then time for bed. The adventure is unfolding before your very eyes. Don't go anywhere!

A Mix of Life

This week has been one of those weeks that I both love and hate at the same time.

It's been busy with working on homework and other outside activities such as the lecture on Modern Egyptian history that we had on Sunday, yesterday's movie night (which I will elaborate more on as you all know my love of movies) and the girl's night that will occur tomorrow night as the start to my wonderful weekend. Well...hopefully wonderful weekend. 

The nice thing about being busy with all of this stuff is that it allows me to forget about all the social skills that I lack that are now coming into view. I don't mean for this post to be a downer and I promise I'll end it on a good note, but for now I need to vent. 

-Begin ramblings of feelings.-  

It has occurred to me, in the three weeks I've been in Egypt, that I don't think I will find anyone who will be my "travel buddy". The someone that just goes with me when I want to go somewhere or the someone who calls me when they want to do something. I'm finding out that the girls here just don't understand me and I'm unsure as to what the boys think. I mean, we get along fine in classes and when we hang out in groups it seems fine, but outside of that, I feel like I'm pushing myself out there to make friends and its all for nothing. I have to really make it known if I want to go somewhere or do something or I have to be there when plans are decided or I'm left out in the cold. 


My one flatmate, Garrett, has Egyptian friends from college living here and so she's often running off with them. My other flatmate, Ann, gives me this vibe of not really liking me. Like I'm an obnoxious little flea that she just wishes she could get rid of. The other girls all live together and while I want to be their friend, Haley just sort of ignores me, Lindley is ok, Shruti doesn't understand what I'm saying half of the time and Rebecca is lumped in with Haley and Lindley.


I don't know why this is either. I've been as nice and friendly as I can and I'm still not getting anywhere with anyone. I'm hoping that this is just the first three weeks being awkward, but I'm unsure. And in a way, it's making me angry. I just want to do things on my weekends so that I don't feel like I'm wasting my time in Cairo. But, as of right now, I guess that means I have to go it alone. 


-End ramblings of feelings.-


So, now that you've actually seen some feeling coming from me...as most of you never see any kind of feeling come from me or from this blog anyway...now you have. I hope that this post changes in the next few days/weeks, but I don't know. 


In other news, the lecture on Sunday night wasn't too bad. But, we did try to cram a lot of history into a short period of time. Probably not the best idea, but it had to happen. We all needed to know how Egypt got to this point in time. It helps to understand where we are coming from when we do things like walk down the street everyday. 


On Monday, we held the first Arabic movie night. I was rather excited because you all know how I am with films. I get all giddy every single time I get the opportunity to watch one. So, we watched The Yacoubian Building, which is considered the biggest Arabic movie in terms of budget to ever be made. I had heard about it before, but I had never seen it. It was really good. It does things that some movies have a lot of problems doing. It weaves together the lives of several individuals (5 main characters) all of whom live in The Yacoubian Building. You watch on screen as the characters' lives intersect and collide in ways you never thought imaginable. As a filmmaker, this film was amazing. 


After the movie ended, we had the opportunity to talk about it with some of our Egyptian peers who had also come to see the movie. I got to meet my language buddy, Emam, here. (I hope maybe we can be good friends at least.) And it was while I talked to Emam's aunt I realized that she had a very different perspective on the same film that I had just watched. She said that she did not like the movie because it only showed the negative side of living in Cairo. That she likes movies that bring people together, not ones like this. 

It took me a little bit to understand where she was coming from. I mean, I view these characters as just that characters in a story. And in order to make a story interesting you impose problems and allow them to deal with them in the manner that would fit their character. She, however, saw this as a representation of her culture. That this movie made in Egypt, by Egyptians, tarnished the way others would view the Egyptian culture based on this one movie. I guess that makes sense, but for me I wouldn't think of it in such a way. But, maybe I should start adding that perspective to how I watch movies. Who knows...I might be onto something...like a term paper topic...


And that pretty much brings us up to the present. I'm tired and still have to work on my Egyptian Arabic homework before class tomorrow morning. I may just take the book upstairs and work on it in my nice comfy bed, in my layers of nice warm pajamas. That just sounds really appealing, especially as the car horns outside the window are getting really annoying. 


I'm kind of looking forward to girl's night. Hopefully, it will bring me closer with the girls, but who knows. I'll let you know as time goes on. But, for now. I really should get back to my homework. 


More updates coming soon....